“Driver Wanted for Obama Motorcade. Novice Welcome,” the New York Times reports with a distinct lack of self-awareness:
Ms. Tyson said in a telephone interview several weeks after she drove in the motorcade that she had received little instruction from the Secret Service about what to do in the event of a high-speed emergency. She assumed that she should just follow the car in front of her no matter what happened.
“Whatever I am,” she said, “is good enough for them.”
“Good enough for them” is apparently having a driver’s license and a clean criminal record, and knowing someone at the White House.
A week before Mr. Obama arrived in San Francisco, a childhood friend of Ms. Tyson’s from Cupertino, Calif., who now works at the White House, reached out to her to see if she was interested in driving.
“He just texted me and said, ‘Do you want to volunteer as part of this and drive in the motorcade?’ ” Ms. Tyson said. “It was kind of sudden. I didn’t even know the president was going to be in town.”
Ms. Tyson said that her driving record was “pristine” and that she had “driven a pickup truck but not a van.”
Some security experts said the practice was troubling. Not only could the volunteers cause an accident — and they have — but they are sandwiched between the president’s limousine and the Secret Service ambulance, so neophyte drivers could create complications and delays in an emergency.
Gee, wait’ll the Times discovers what complications, delays and emergencies can result when promoting a neophyte politician to become the man at the center of that enormous motorcade, over a senator with four terms in office, a Navy war hero background and a sitting US governor as his veep.
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